Giphy will expand GIFs into virtual reality, smart glasses, and paper
Adam Leibsohn · 20VC: Giphy's Adam Leibsohn on From Being Homeless To Founding a Multi Hundred Million Dollar Startup & The Challenges of Creating One of The World's Largest Search Engine · Sep 9, 2016 · at 25:18
Adam Leibsohn, COO of Giphy, outlines the five-year product vision for Giphy, aiming to expand visual moving-image search beyond screens into VR and physical mediums.
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“GIFs in virtual reality, GIFs in your glasses, GIFs outside of computers, GIFs on paper. You know, a whole new kind of search engine that no one's ever seen before, where everything moves, which resembles all of life. Just think of what you look at in the world and how that actually behaves in your real life. That's how we want the internet to behave. Everything shouldn't move. And so we're working on it.”
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More from Adam Leibsohn
Leibsohn spent a year homeless to self-fund his first startup
“I actually gave up my apartment, and I went homeless for a year, and instead of quitting my job, I kept my job, and I paid rent like I would pay rent, but I didn't have anything to rent, so I paid that rent into a savings account and built my own fund.”
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“I started taking out search ads against prominent VCs and reporters in tech so that when they Googled themselves, they'd get an ad from me and it worked astonishingly well.”
Relying on too many 'what ifs' signals a startup is dead
“When you start dealing in too many what ifs, you probably know it's done. I think that's a good signal.”
Startups attempting to turn personal data into currency will keep resurfacing
“I was not the first to try this. I've not been the last. I think it'll come around again and again and again.”
Google succeeded because slow early internet speeds forced a text-based web
“Processor speed was also slow, and so again, imagery was hard to move, and that's why the initial web was very textual, and that's why Google was so good at indexing stuff, because it was all filled with words and not with images.”
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